Retronator

Dwerve, the tower defense crawler RPG that I wrote about previously during its Kickstarter, just got a new trailer and a demo!

The fresh look into the game’s backstory of warsmiths comes from PAX West and is as smooth as ever (watch it above). Visitors of the convention are also welcomed to play the new Dwerve: Prologue, as are you (if you’re staying at home), since it’s available for free on Steam.

If this is your first look at Dwerve, it plays as an action RPG, except when battle time comes, you’re placing down turrets to do your bidding, smoothly transitioning the gameplay into tower defense. Give the demo a try and experience beautiful art from Pixel Pete, Enchae, and Sun Pixels while kicking some troll butt.

An awesome Kickstarter came across me this morning and it’s from no other then Emma ‘Eniko’ Maassen of Kitsune Games (previously on Kickstarter with Lore Finder).

I’m super excited, because this time she’s doing an educational video series explaining some of the cool ways old games did 3D graphics. Coding History: 3D from Mode7 to DOOM will cover (at least) 12 episodes, the 7 originally planned ones and 5 added through the first stretch goal:

• Sprite based 3D dungeons (Lands of Lore, Phantasy Star)
• Pseudo 3D (Outrun)
• Raycasting (Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad)
• Mode 7 (Super Mario Kart, F-Zero)
• Voxel terrain (Comanche)
• Binary space partitions (DOOM)
• Portals (Duke Nukem 3D/Build Engine)
• Polygonal software rendering
• Perspective
• Flat polygon shading
• Textured polygon shading
• Programmable pipeline (shaders)
  

Just watching the campaign video made me look forward to enjoying footage of old games while also learning how they made them work—and how you can code such engines yourself too! 

If you’d like to support Eniko’s efforts to let us all geek out over computer rendering, hop on over to Kickstarter and send some funds her way.

Back in 2018/2019 when new features of Pixel Art Academy were being released quite frequently, I started my Pixel Art Academy 101 series of videos where new concepts were explained when they entered alpha stage (early access).

I haven’t been sleeping since then and it’s time to start Pixel Art Academy 102, a new season of video updates that will focus on the next chapter of the game, leading with the learning materials added to the Retropolis Academy of Art Study Guide.

It’s been almost 2 years since Savior completed its Kickstarter campaign, and oh boy was this blog in need of an update of awesome GIFs and environments from my most anticipated parkour/fighting game.

What’s extra interesting about their backer updates is that you get to see a lot of locations in their concept art phases (drawn by Robert Borth), which is not something we often see for pixel art games, especially concept illustrations with such clean execution.

It’s even more amazing when you get to see these turned into gorgeous, animated pixels by Weston Tracy and the team.

We also got a decent look into Savior’s features and story back in March during the Future Games Spring Showcase:

If you want to follow the development of Starsoft’s debut title, hop over to their website for social media links.

Almost a year ago I announced that I’m starting to run a physical school called The Indie Quest where my game’s art curriculum is being used. I’ll be talking about the whole experience in my 6-year anniversary video in August, but I also recently started doing The Indie Quest vlog where I talk about the school on a biweekly basis.

The sixth episode above is especially interesting for this blog since I talk about how the Pixel Art Academy curriculum comes together in the environment concept art missions at The Indie Quest. Check it out to learn more about the work I do at the school.

Environment concept art of the island Hapunui for my game Pixel Art Academy.

Very much inspired by 90s dithered point-and-click adventure backgrounds, in particular Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Some more words on the devlog (4 posts in total) or in today’s Spelkollektivet livestream.

This is not your usual Retronator post, but I’m a huge computer science nerd, so when I saw how well NVIDIA and Cornell’s GANcraft neural network transformed a Minecraft voxel world into a realistic representation, I just had to make some GIFs and share it with you.

I’ll let Károly from the excellent Two Minute Papers channel share the enthusiasm further:

And if you want to see the original researchers’ video, take a look here:

There are more and more art styles that live on the spectrum between pixels, voxels, and low-poly 3D. One interesting approach has always been sprite stacking, a technique for rendering voxel art by drawing individual pixel art cross-sections and offsetting them to create depth.

SpriteStack by Przemysław ‘Rezoner’ Sikorski is a specialized tool that lets you do just that. We got a teaser recently of all the upcoming features for the 2021 version and it’s really pushing the software beyond its humble (but very well received) beginnings back in 2019.

The development has hit a bit of a snag in 2020 (a hard year for many), but luckily Rezoner didn’t let the project die completely and is finally back, ready to bring the new features to release.

The 2021 version needs a couple more months of uninterrupted work to get done, so you can help Rezoner get them by supporting him on Patreon or by buying the previous version on Itch ($30) or Steam (currently on sale for $24).

If you haven’t heard yet, Apogee is back! They announced their return to publishing back in April with a combination of new titles and remasters of their classics. They already released Crystal Caves HD back in October last year and I was very happy about it since a good buddy of mine, Primož from Emberheart Games (Courier of the Crypts), made the conversion.

This week another Apogee remaster was released, Secret Agent HD! The classic title from 1992 was drawn by George Broussard and now comes with spruced up colors thanks to Primož.

That’s what I love about Emberheart Games’ remakes, they’re remasters with a wider palette, but otherwise stick to the original pixel art. Just like Crystal Caves HD, the new Secret Agent also comes with a bunch of other goodies like smooth scrolling and movement, a level editor, a completely new episode with more enemies …

If this brings out a tear of nostalgia, you can relive your childhood memories on Steam or GOG ($8).

As for Primož, he’s already working on the next remaster, Monster Bash HD! Check out the Emberheart Games Discord to stay in touch.

One project I’m still looking very much forward to—regardless of its challenging development cycle—is Starr Mazer. Starting its way on Kickstarter in early 2015, updates on the space-fighting adventure got sparse as legal drama surrounded the project in 2017. That’s a story for another day—the important thing is, the project never stopped. As Confucius said about Kickstarter projects, “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” At least if you keep your backers updated.

And updated we got! The hundredth one hit today and it’s filled to the brink with new details from the development plus the usual relentless enthusiasm of creative director Don Thacker (whom you might have seen in the splendorous spectacle that was Devolver MaxPass+ Showcase, which he directed). I’ll let you dive into the Drydock Report on your own, I just wanted to do you the service of getting the best of the 2021 GIFs and PNGs from the evolving world of the point-and-click-and-shmup adventur hybrid in front of your eyes on the blog.

It’s a good time for Sonic The Hedgehog fans as we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the platformer series, which launched on the Sega Genesis (a.k.a. Mega Drive) on June 23, 1991.

On Wednesday we were delighted with an orchestra performance that kept on giving, as the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra switched (and joined) airtime with Tomoya Ohtani Band (Sonic’s sound director) and Crush 40 (contributors of many rock/metal songs to Sonic’s soundtracks over the years).

And if this wasn’t enough, Epic put Sonic Mania on their store for free for the next two weeks! It’s a must have since it’s the only modern pixel art Sonic game released in the last decade. A bunch of artists from the scene worked on the title, including @superpietepiet and @midio. Go grab it while it’s hot (again)!

I was a big fan of Antoine ‘Sir Carma’ Lendrevie’s voxel art ever since I wrote my big article on pixels and voxels in 2016. Not long after, Antoine moved to Vancouver—the home of Brace Yourself Games—and started working as lead artist (and now art director, among other artists) on the simulation/strategy game Industries of Titan.

What followed were 4 years of patiently looking at cubes being carefully arranged into delicious dioramas on his Twitter, merging slowly into vast sci-fi cityscapes you can marvel at in the screenshots above (make sure to see them up big to take in all the voxel detail).

Finally the good news, you can now start colonizing the largest moon of Saturn yourself, as Industries of Titan landed in early access yesterday on Steam and Epic!

The world of Norco is just something else. The southern USA point-and-click adventure has been no stranger on this blog. Quite to the contrary, thanks to the magic of Tumblr I’ve had my eyes on @geographyofrobots’ project all the way back in its EGA days.

A lot has happened since my last look over a year ago, most recently this week Geography of Robots won the Tribeca Games Award, the latest addition to New York’s Tribeca (film) festival. The competition was strong and you can see the entries in the presentation where Norco gets introduced by the by-now-already-memeified Norman Reedus (at the 25:53 mark). It was nice to also finally put a face to Yuts after all these years.

In other news, Raw Fury picked up the publishing part of Norco’s release process. There’s even a new demo out that you can play right now on Steam.

No release date has been announced yet, so maybe there’ll be another post on this blog about the game in a year or so. We’ll see!

I’m a game developer, but you don’t get many finished games from me. Pixel Art Academy is the longest project I ever embarked on and while I regularly release alpha updates, it will probably take another decade to wrap the game up (check out my video I made a text adventure in 5 years (with 10 more to come)).

There is, however, a game jam happening every now and then when I take the opportunity to work on something small and bring it to completion. This past weekend I took part of the 48h-long GMTK Game Jam. After not much sleep, our team of three submitted a build of RetroCop, an FPS where you have to survive an onslaught of ghosts in a maze that is constructed and destroyed as you play.

The theme of the jam was “joined together”, so the rooms procedurally join and break apart. The game is also pretty much Doom+Tetris+PAC-MAN joined together (with Tron+RoboCop on top for the art style). I was happily surprised how entertaining the game is and the short, unforgiving play sessions make you want to try again and again.

The programmer put a bit of a crazy mouse sensitivity into the submitted game jam version (which you can try in the browser), so I made a new build yesterday with some more fixes and goodies squeezed in (menu music, dynamic mini-map location, better ghost hitbox). If you want to give the new version a try, you can download it for macOS, Windows, or Linux.

There are few topics more divisive in the (pixel) art world right now than NFTs, save perhaps for the decades-long debate what even is pixel art and whether the use of dithering should be a punishable offense or not.

Nobody has the full data on NFTs’ impact, and if the world ran on 100% renewable energy, maybe the whole debate would end up leaving just a lot of people confused why anyone would want to pay astronomical prices for digital ownership of something that can be perfectly replicated. Alas, all we can do now is read articles on environmental issues and glowing success stories, followed by a bit of a headache and an individual decision that is more ideological than we’d like.

While I’m personally not on board of the NFT train, what I am hyped about is all the amazing pixel artists we’ll get to hear from during the Pixel Art NFT Week, happening online from today, June 14, till Friday, June 18. You can see some familiar names above, with many more visible on the event’s website.

The sessions happening are:

• Monday: Artist Chat: It Starts With Pixels
• Tuesday: SQUARED Gallery Opening
• Wednesday: WHALE Community Interview
• Thursday: WHALE Community Text Chat
• Friday: Artist Chat: The Future Is Pixels

The opening chat (today at 11AM PDT, 8PM CEST) will be conducted on Twitter Spaces (i.e. Twitter’s Clubhouse-like live audio platform). Other gathering locations include Discord and an online (+ VR) metaverse gallery. For details, see the full schedule, and follow daily notifications on Twitter.